Hope, seeing the good, and the value of keeping your mouth shut
Lessons from N.T. Wright's biography of St. Paul
I’ve always struggled with two parts of the New Testament: the Gospel of John and the letters of Paul.
I’ve been trying to overcome both of these. My reading of N.T. Wright’s biography of Paul was an attempt to make spiritual friends with a man who, as I said a few weeks ago, desperately needed to find a period and an editor.
But N.T. Wright cut through all those issues. I’ve talked about this book before, but today I want to share some nuggets of understanding that have helped me. Maybe they’ll hold something for you as well.
1. The meaning of “hope,” as Paul used it. In Paul’s world, there was oppression and darkness everywhere. When he talks about hope, it is a “dogged and deliberate choice when the world seemed dark. … this God could be trusted to sort things out in the end … even if it had to be on the other side of terrible suffering.” In other words, hope is not something you feel, it’s a virtue you practice, “like a difficult piece on the violin.” (p. 45)
2. When you read Scripture in isolation, as most of us do, the timeline isn’t always clear. But in fact, after Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, he disappeared for ten years. It was only after that long silence that he began his travels as an apostle of Jesus Christ.
We don’t know for sure what was happening during those years, because there’s no record. But it makes perfect sense that he needed to hit “pause.” He had been vocal and active against Jesus, and now he has this whole new world view to process. He can’t dive right back in; he has to understand what has changed before he can do anything for Jesus.
This jumped out at me because—well, I suppose I can only speak for myself with any certainty, but it seems reasonable to think I’m not the only one. How often do we leap in and knee-jerk share or react or comment without fully understanding what we’re talking about? And how often do we realize we really didn’t have any business speaking up in that moment, because there was so much we didn’t know? The trouble is, to make any impact you have to dive in RIGHT NOW, because if you wait to learn and process, by the time you speak up, everyone has moved on. But the alternative is no good, either. You jump in not fully formed, and you’ve got ego wrapped up in it, and the need to save face, so you can’t say, “Oops, I got that one wrong.” You just have to keep doubling down.
Seeing this deep, long silence from Paul for the first time made me aspire to incorporate that wisdom.
3. Hanging on my wall upstairs is a tapestry written in Chinese characters, a gift from a Taiwanese friend. It lays out that beautiful passage from Philippians about “whatever is true, whatever is holy… think on these things, and the God of peace will be with you.” For a person who has grappled with anxiety in one form or another, in myself or in loved ones, pretty much my entire adult life, the message seems straightforward.
But N.T. Wright digs deeper. He points back to Paul’s home town. Tarsus was a crossroads, a place where many, many cultures and religions were expressed in one place. A melting-pot, so to speak.
Paul is saying, here, that all goodness in the world comes from God. This seems like a “duh” statement, except when you put it in the context and realize he’s saying that there are good things within these other cultures and religions, and that those good things, however imperfectly expressed, however flawed, are of God.
I think we struggle with this. How many times I’ve heard about the dangers of yoga or Eastern meditation to one’s faith—to name a couple off the top of my head. Any faith can be used badly or corrupted, ours no less than any other. But there are good and praiseworthy and even holy things in them, and those things, Paul reminds us, come from God and should be honored as such. (p. 76)
This seems like a particularly important message for the time we live in. Polarization leads us to toe a rigid party line, even though there are nuggets of Godliness within platforms across the aisle. Thus you see social-justice minded Christians trying to justify legal abortion and pro-life advocates claiming that guns aren’t the problem.
What about you? Do these nuggets speak to you?
I appreciate N.T.Wright as well. He is highly educated and intelligent. His work is mostly quite worthwhile to study. I would also recommend Pope Benedict XVI’s Catechesis on St Paul. You can find them at the Vatican’s website, and they have been conveniently published in book form. It is hard to believe but Benedict XVI/Joseph Ratzinger dives deeper and more accurately than even N.T. Wright! ☦️